2022 ISIF Asia grant recipients announced

The APNIC Foundation is pleased to announce the 2022 round of ISIF Asia grants!

The 18 grants – valued at a combined USD 1.23 million – include funding for satellite connectivity to support education projects in Samoa, the development of a Security Operations Center to support SMEs in Thailand, a disaster early warning system in Pakistan and a bug bounty programs to improve security within Sri Lankan government agencies.

This includes the five inaugural funding recipients of the Ian Peter Grants for Internet and the Environment, which will working around Internet availability as part of disaster response and preparedness as well as support for research in the intersection between Internet technologies and climate change. Grantees include the EcoInternet index, IoT deployments focusing on water management and disaster response, as well as efforts to tackle climate misinformation. The Ian Peter grants are split across the Inclusion and Knowledge programs.

Four economies are receiving ISIF Asia grants for the first time – Samoa, Hong Kong, Mongolia and the Republic of Korea . Grant recipients in 2022 overall are spread across 14 economies. The total number of economies supported by ISIF Asia grants now stands at 31 of the 56 in the APNIC Foundation region.

The full list of project summaries is included below. Headings show project title, grantee organization, economy and grant amount. Grants are listed by Foundation program, and by category (Impact, Scale-up or Small grants) in descending order of grant size.

Follow links for easy navigation.

INFRASTRUCTURE

INCLUSION

KNOWLEDGE

IAN PETER GRANTS FOR INTERNET AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Infrastructure

Samoa district connectivity project. Bluewave Wireless Company Limited. Samoa. USD 150,000.

There is a huge need to address the digital divide in rural communities in Samoa and provide Internet access to unserved and underserved communities. Currently the lack of reliable Internet access in rural areas in Samoa prevents communities from being able to fully participate in activities such as digital education, e-commerce and other online digital activities which can enhance their livelihoods.

This impact grant will enable the deployment of satellite connectivity to district sites across Samoa, (mainly rural and village-based communities), who currently have little to no reliable connectivity.  These unserved and underserved rural communities will also require redundancy for disaster preparedness.

These satellite sites will increase Internet availability and provide reliable connectivity access, through a dedicated district server where key social, economic and education initiatives can be delivered for community members.  This aligns with and supports the Government of Samoa’s District Community projects.

OpenLI for the Pacific Islands.  University of Waikato.  New Zealand. USD 85,000.

Conventional, proprietary, lawful intercept systems are expensive to buy, technically challenging to understand and can be difficult to manage.  For smaller economies and providers this substantial overhead that does not contribute to customer services but is often particularly important for law enforcement.

This scale-up grant will work with members of the Pacific Islands network operator and law enforcement communities to provide in-person and online training and support for Lawful Intercept deployment and operation.  It will use OpenLI the world’s only open source, ETSI-standard Lawful Intercept system.  Further development of OpenLI to meet local needs will also be part of the grant.

Open-source SOC-as-a-service for small and medium manufacturers. National Electronics and Computer Technology Center. Thailand. USD 30,000. 

Cybersecurity, though an essential component, is addressed less than other elements in the context of Thailand’s Industry 4.0 program. Strengthening cybersecurity in manufacturing means securing not only the IT (information technology) infrastructure, but also the OT (operation technology) components such as machines, controllers, and shop-floor facilities. To prevent and reduce impacts of cyber-attacks in a factory setting, a complex real-time monitoring and evaluation of cyber risks is necessary.

This small grant will fund the development of a Security Operations Center (SOC) to support small and medium factories in Thailand. This SOC will be implemented with all open-source software to reduce development and operation cost, making this service sustainable and affordable to SMEs. This project will test the prototype SOC services with three small and medium-sized factories. These factories will receive standard SOC services: cybersecurity monitoring, incident response, vulnerability assessment and threat analysis for a period of at least three months. After fine-tuning the SOC operation and service based on feedback from these factories, the prototype SOC-as-a-service model will scale out to serve more factories in Thailand.

IPv6 Deployment Grants

ISIF Asia also recently announced four IPv6 Deployment grants, that are part of the Infrastructure program. They were:

  • BOOM! Inc., Micronesia: USD 250,000
  • Tonga Communication Corporation, Tonga: USD 250,000
  • National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, India: USD 240,000
  • Yayasan Badan Wakaf Universitas Islam Indonesia, Indonesia: USD 60,000

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Inclusion

Indigitech PacifiCode. Digital Education Limited. Samoa. USD 150,000

In 2019, Digital Education Limited (publicly known as Code Avengers) visited the big island of Savai’i and found that only two out of 61 schools visited had Internet connectivity and access to e-learning platforms. Teachers reported feeling left behind as they had limited access to educational resources.

In 2021, Code Avengers and E3 Rural Samoa Trust successfully piloted a coding workshop at Siufaga School in Savai’i. Currently the teachers at Siufaga School are running it as an after-school program which has had a total of 128 students.

This impact grant will increase digital literacy and bridge the digital divide. The project will increase the capacity of 10 schools to deliver ICT education. It will improve Internet access, availability to hardware and professional development of key teachers to deliver an empowered in-classroom program that aligns to the Samoan ICT curriculum and gives students confidence in a digital world.

Be the A11y. PT Suara Inklusi Semesta. Indonesia. USD 85.000

People with disabilities in Indonesia face difficulties accessing vital information and digital services that are currently not following digital accessibility (a11y) standards.

This scale-up grant will fund the further development and first use case of Ba11y. Ba11y is a crowdsourced accessibility reporting platform designed to gather feedback from people with visual impairment across Indonesia to evaluate the accessibility of various local websites and applications. The use case will seek to influence companies or services to take action to improve their level of digital accessibility.

In addition, this project seeks to improve technical capacity through activities such as the pop-up empathy lab, bootcamp, and design challenges. These activities expect to expand understanding and increase technical capacity to build inclusive and accessible digital products and enhance collaboration between technical communities and people with disabilities in Indonesia.

Combating cyberbullying for better Internet inclusivity: An optimized deep learning approach. Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. Malaysia. USD 30,000.

There is limited awareness of cyberbullying in developing economies, particularly in areas with recent Internet penetration, and particularly among young people.

This small grant will embark on fostering awareness of cyberbullying threats through several promotional activities in Malaysia and Indonesia. The grant also aims to increase Internet inclusivity by reducing the likelihood of cyberbullying caused by religion, gender, race, and age.

This project will develop an optimized deep learning-based algorithm that can identify cyberbullying incidences automatically. The proposed algorithm will also help in promoting awareness of cyberbullying threats by providing examples of words linked with cyberbullying attempts.

Empowering women, youth, and special needs people in the tech Sector. UULEN TYEKHNOLOGI SONIRKHOGCH ZALUU INJYENYERUUDIIN BULGEM TBB. Mongolia. USD 30,000

In Mongolia, there is a severe shortage of Internet engineers. At the same time, groups like women, youth, and those with special needs experience higher levels of unemployment.

This small grant will help address this skills disconnect.

Most of the technical engineers that work in Mongolia graduated from domestic universities, which means they often have not had opportunities to study cloud technology or developed skills in foreign languages. UULEN TYEKHNOLOGI SONIRKHOGCH ZALUU INJYENYERUUDIIN BULGEM TBB (known publicly as The Cloud Academy) teaches relevant, up-to-date cloud skills with an internationally certified curriculum in Mongolian native language, but with professional technical terms in English to help assist participants to connect with their peers globally.

Affordable Internet for the community by the community. Janata Wifi Ltd. Bangladesh. USD 30,000.

Most of the Bangladesh population uses smartphones as their primary device to access the Internet. They can neither afford to pay for high-quality cellular broadband subscription fees, nor can they bear the initial setup cost of cable broadband.

This small grant will allow for setting up community Wi-Fi hotspots in low-income areas, where people can use high-quality and affordable broadband Internet with the mobile devices they already own. These community hotspots would comprise Wi-Fi access points, wireless access gateway, broadband backhaul, innovative software, and power backup to ensure high-bandwidth uninterrupted Internet connection without data usage limits.

Micro merchants from the communities would act as hosts and marketers of these hotspots and local Internet Service Providers would provide the broadband backhaul. This model provides incentives to all stakeholders to expand and maintain affordable broadband coverage for even the most disadvantaged communities.

Assisting natural beekeeping in rural and remote areas using LoRa-based IoT and Drones. Sejong University. Republic of Korea. 30,000.

Beehive management and monitoring are challenges for beekeepers, particularly those using natural methods, because the beehives are widely dispersed around rural and remote areas where the terrain makes transportation and telecommunication difficult.

This small grant will study proof of concept ideas for providing Internet availability by using an Internet of Things (IoT) and drone system for remote beehive management.

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Knowledge

Building a model for community networks linked to social enterprise and sustainable local economic development. Institute for Social Entrepreneurship in Asia, Inc. Bangladesh, China and the Philippines. USD 150,000

This impact grant will kickstart development of a model to understand how community networks can be linked to social enterprise and sustainable local economic development.  The project will explore how these models could contribute to addressing the challenge of sustainability faced by community networks serving poor communities and households that usually do not have the capacity to pay for connectivity services. The project will explore different approaches in Bangladesh, China and The Philippines.

In Bangladesh, the project will support a cellular router system in the Chittagong Hill Tracts region, serving women groups and artisans who are already suppliers to a Fair-Trade organization, so that they are connected through the Internet and able to communicate with product designers, quality checkers, and marketing channels. In China, a digital platform will be created to connect smallholder farmers to document, share and showcase their knowledge on quality food production, biodiversity conservation, sustainable farming and local cultural practices. In the Philippines, the project will support innovative schemes of digital networking and marketing addressing poor connectivity to serve community-based coffee enterprises of farmers and indigenous communities as well as organized small-scale producers engaged in the sustainable agriculture value chain.

Government bug bounty program. SCoRe Lab. Sri Lanka. USD 85,000.

Bug Zero is currently actively promoting bug bounties in local private institutions and aims to expand the scope by introducing bug bounties to governmental institutions in partnership with the Information Communication Technology Agency (ICTA) and SL Cert in Sri Lanka.

This scale-up grant will help to carry out initial threat modelling for building a threat classification framework for all government and government-affiliated entities, which includes 200+ potential individual government organizations. This will aid in the promotion of bug bounties as an effective tool for government organizations as well as a good economic opportunity for youth.

In the initial phase, the project will run pilot programs for the identified set of government entities to understand the end-to-end pipeline that involves from getting a vulnerability report to an actual fix in terms of helping them with not only using the bug bounty platform but also with the triaging and vulnerability remediation validation phases.

Adversarial machine learning attacks in wireless networks. Griffith University. Australia. USD 30,000

This project investigates adversarial machine learning attacks in wireless networks where malicious attackers use machine learning to learn the characteristics of wireless channels to tamper with network communications.

This small grant will implement a Software-Defined Radio (SDR)-based adversarial machine learning attacks in wireless networks and evaluate the impact of these attacks. A good understanding of these adversarial attacks will enable the design of effective countermeasures against them.

PumonAI: Multi Institutional Collaboration for Pneumonia Screening. Universitas Prasetiya Mulya. Indonesia. USD 30,000

Pneumonia is considered one of the leading causes of death in children under the age of five worldwide, with one child dying every 39 seconds. In Indonesia, according to UNICEF, childhood pneumonia alone claimed the lives of more than 19,000 children under five in 2018. Such a high number of childhood pneumonia death cases ranks Indonesia among the highest in the world, above all other Southeast Asian countries.

This small grant will help develop a system for fast pneumonia detection with high precision and robustness, accessible through various devices, such as smartphone, personal computer as well as the Picture Archiving and Communication (PACS) workstations used in hospitals.

The project will develop a collaboration platform among hospitals using Artificial Intelligence in vast area in Indonesia. This project will not only be dedicated to early detection of pneumonia, but also reinforcing patient data anonymity and privacy.

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Ian Peter Grants for Internet and the Environment

ISLET Connect. CVISNET Foundation, Inc. Philippines. USD 85,000

The digital divide in the Philippines has resulted in uneven distribution of Internet access points, with them being concentrated in areas with vast population. This threatens the social and economic progress of those living in secluded communities including the islands of Gilutongan, Cawhagan and Pangan-an under the City of Lapu-lapu and the Municipality of Cordova Cebu, Philippines. These islands have only limited to no Internet service connection.

The Internet for Safety, Livelihood, e-Education and Tourism for Vulnerable Islands of Cebu Province (ISLET Connect) Project focuses on providing the identified remote and vulnerable islands a stable broadband Internet solution and a solar powered Locally Accessible Cloud System (LACS) facility for immediate communication and disaster response support which can be used even in the absence of telecommunication and Internet services. The project also aims to establish project sustainability through the promotion of correct utilization of the internet service to maximize the community’s progress in terms of Safety, Livelihood, e-Education and Tourism. 

This grant is in the Inclusion program.

Early warning and communication system for flood risk reduction in Gilgit-Baltistan. Lahore University of Management Sciences. Pakistan. USD 85,000.

Pakistan is among the most vulnerable countries to climate change, as evidenced by multiple climate disasters, including the 2022 floods, increasing Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOF), and rain-fed flash floods. This increasing vulnerability to climate change, especially in the high mountain region of Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, has necessitated installing a Flood Early Warning System that is scalable and sustainable within the economic, infrastructure, and digital divide context of the region. 

This scale-up grant will help us leverage open-source IoT technologies to deploy cost-effective, off-grid flood early warning systems to build the disaster risk resilience of climate-vulnerable communities in Gilgit- Baltistan, Pakistan. We will also explore the solution space of Internet technologies, especially the TV White Space devices, and assess its feasibility as a cost-effective broadband pop-up Internet service.

This grant is in the Inclusion program.

IoT data-driven water management for climate resilient communities. Similie Timor Lda. Timor Leste. USD 85,000.

Climate hazards such as droughts, floods, and heavy rains are greatly affecting communities throughout the Asia-Pacific. Over 80% of Timor Leste’s rural population depends on rain-fed agriculture, and the majority of domestic water supplies are fed by high altitude vulnerable shallow aquifers. The lack of conservation activities regularly results in topsoil loss. Conservation activities around catchment areas have been ongoing in Timor Leste for over a decade. While many communities have benefited from these efforts, the government can be reluctant to include these activities in its national policies, as there is no quantitative data to validate them.

This Scale Up grant will fund and develop Similie’s ability to use data-driven science to monitor conservation and remote water supply activities. Similie’s IoT technology will be deployed and monitor two rural catchment areas, water supply and localized weather activities. The data will then be analyzed and visualized within the Similie online platform.

This grant is in the Knowledge program.

EcoInternet index. DotAsia Foundation Ltd. Hong Kong. USD 30,000.

Following the largest drop in global carbon emissions in 2020 due to the pandemic, emissions levels have bounced back to their highest ever. With the non-stop, explosive growth of Internet use, it is important to figure out the formula for a sustainable and eco-friendly Internet.
 
This small grant will fund the continual research on carbon footprints of Internet infrastructures, efficiency of data exchange, use of renewable energy in the country, and development of digital economy. These would all factor into the EcoInternet Index, which would enable meaningful and comprehensive comparisons among different jurisdictions and observe the changes throughout the years.
 
These analyses would be useful indicators for policy making and implementation, to drive governments and business sectors to join their efforts together to lay out concrete action plans towards an EcoInternet.

This grant is in the Knowledge program.

Tackling climate change misinformation. Faculty of Social and Political Science through the Center for Digital Society. Indonesia. USD 30,000.

Online misinformation usually targets certain demographics that are prone to misinformation due to a lack of digital literacy.

This small grant will help the Center for Digital Society map digital literacy skills, to help counter misinformation related to climate-change and improve digital literacy skills. It will consist of a series of training events dedicated to demographic groups who are most vulnerable. It will also contribute to policy development through research.

The first stage of the project comprises several research activities: desk research, online survey, and sentiment analysis research. The second stage consists of a series of community outreach programs.

This grant is in the Knowledge program.

The APNIC Foundation thanks all applicants for sharing their ideas, the members of the Selection Committees for their hard work, and the Trust for supporting these projects. Technical reports on the projects will be published on the ISIF Asia website as they are completed.

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Announcing the ISIF Asia Awards 2022!

You are invited to join us in celebrating this year’s ISIF Asia Awardees!  

The 2022 awards will be presented at the APNIC54 conference during the APNIC Foundation conference session, and you can join the session in person or online, by following the information about the session on the conference program.

The ISIF Asia Awards were first introduced in 2011 to celebrate the outstanding organizations and individuals supporting community needs through innovative uses of Internet technologies. Awardees receive USD 5,000 and support to attend the APNIC54 conference in Singapore. 

This year’s awards will recognize two exceptional contributions:

The Network coded tunnels for satellite links project, led by the University of Auckland (New Zealand) that lets remote island communities in the Pacific make more efficient use of the satellite Internet connections they rely on. Project leader Dr. Ulrich Speidel will accept the award.

The Honeynet Threat Sharing Platform, designed by Swiss German University (Indonesia), collects, categorizes, and distributes cybersecurity threat information from malicious traffic discovered in partner “honeypots” around the world. Project leader Dr. Charles Lim, will accept the award.

We look forward to seeing you at the Foundation session at APNIC54!  

Report available! Open Lawful Intercept for Asia Pacific

This project improved network operations in Asia Pacific in the area of Lawful Intercept.

OpenLI is the only open source software capable of meeting the ETSI standards for lawful interception. OpenLI has achieved broad acceptance among network operators in New Zealand but is not well known in other countries. It has benefits beyond low cost in that OpenLI is easy to deploy and maintain and is capable of high performance (i.e. multiple Gbps of concurrent interception).

This project worked with APNIC to reach out to operators in other Asia Pacific jurisdictions to understand their requirements for lawful intercept. It then provided development, training and other improvements as required to meet those requirements. It also involved the development of an engagement process to collaborate with network operators to deploy OpenLI and demonstrate that it is capable of meeting their lawful intercept requirements.

The long term aim is to move OpenLI to a sustainable model where the software is reliable and well maintained and continuously developed to meet new network and law enforcement requirements.

The final report is available here.

2021 ISIF Asia grant recipients announced

A large-scale collaborative project among research networks in the Asia Pacific region to build trust and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) capabilities is among the many Internet development and research projects being funded in the newly announced group of ISIF Asia supported projects.

Other projects include IPv6 training, an extensive honeynet cybersecurity project spanning several economies in Asia, and knowledge sharing between Network Operator Groups (NOGs) and Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs).

ISIF Asia received a total of 74 applications for this round of funding, resulting in the biggest group of ISIF Asia grantees ever, with 22 projects covering 16 economies. Some of these projects cover multiple economies. Three economies are receiving funds for the first time: Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, and Lao PDR.

The grants total USD 1.82 million in funding, and are spread across three categories: Infrastructure (developing the Internet), Inclusion (accessing the Internet) and Knowledge (skills and research about the Internet). Funding for these grants is part of the Asia Pacific Internet Development Trust’s 2021 funding for the APNIC Foundation.

The full list of summaries is included below. Follow links below for easy navigation.

INFRASTRUCTURE

INCLUSION

KNOWLEDGE

Infrastructure

Expand the Central Australian Desert Project to serve the Nitjpurru indigenous community in Pigeon Hole. Distant Curve Remote Area Telecommunications. Australia. USD 150,000.

Nitjpurru is a community in Australia’s Northern Territory of approximately 140 people, 450kms away from the nearest town. Nitjpurru is accessible only by four wheel drive vehicle and access is subject to flooding during the wet season. Telecommunications infrastructure is limited to a single payphone, shared by the entire community.

The Central Australian Desert Project connected the Northern Territory communities of Engawala and Atitjere with an embedded system using solar powered microwave relays. This impact grant will fund the development of a similar system for Nitjpurru. The project will also integrate a framework for supervising various systems needed to run the relays, cost-effectively monitor them, and ensure they are providing the necessary connectivity.

Sustainable smart villages in rural Papua New Guinea. Papua New Guinea University of Technology. Papua New Guinea. USD 85,000.

Over 80% of Papua New Guinea’s population lives in rural areas. The government is promoting agriculture and education as key aspects of its development goals, but is challenged by limited connectivity caused by unreliable power supply, a lack of appropriate communications technology, and a shortage of skilled people to maintain infrastructure and train users.

This scale-up grant will help develop a ‘smart village’ solution, seeking to address all these challenges, connecting mobile devices to enhance education and provide information in the local language, supported by a reliable power system monitored by sensors and calibrated based on machine learning techniques. Data traffic, together with power consumption data, will be used to develop a business model for scaling the smart village model further.

The project will provide ten community Wi-Fi sites as sustainable services to rural areas, and aims to cultivate partnerships between industry, community, and academic institutions, to develop digital literacy packages as a cost-effective solution to closing the digital divide for diverse user groups in the community.

Field-ready network-coded tunnels for satellite links. The University of Auckland. New Zealand. USD 85,000.

This project aims to widen the circle of people able to deploy titrated coded tunnels, create reference systems on actual satellite links in the field, and demonstrate that this technology brings actual performance benefits to real users.

This project builds on a previous ISIF Asia project which researched how coded tunnels over satellite links can accelerate individual packet flows. The current project will take it out of the lab and show users that the technology is ready for wider deployment.

This scale-up grant involves a partnership with Gravity Internet and Te One School on Chatham Island, with Gravity Internet being familiarized with the new technology. They will work with an engineering link to Chatham Island using a satellite link to connect to the school.

Hybrid LoRa Network for underserved community Internet. Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. Malaysia. USD 85,000.

The Chini Lake, Pahang area of Malaysia has challenging terrain with thick foliage. These conditions mean that the 500 indigenous Orang Asli residents, spread across six villages, lack access to mobile data coverage.

As a solution, LoRa wireless technology has been proposed. The scale-up grant will help establish a LoRa Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) gateway on a helium balloon, equipped with Mesh LoRa architecture that has text and voice messaging capabilities, as well as a cloud-based data management platform.

This will give local residents access to digital materials through a messaging system, accommodating users of all different literacy levels, as well as water level alerts for mitigation of flooding and drought situations, and an avenue for promoting local products and services through the cloud-based data management platform.

Securing Software Defined Network architectures. The University of Newcastle. Australia. USD 30,000.

This project involves the design and development of techniques for detecting attacks on Software Defined Network (SDN) switches.

SDN has proven useful for handling the growing complexity of networks. It is widely deployed in Enterprise, Cloud, and Internet Service Provider networks. As SDN becomes more common, so do cyberattacks that exploit SDN vulnerabilities. There is a growing need to enhance security in SDN networks. This small grant will implement security techniques to validate against different attacks on SDN switches and develop a Switch Security Application for SDN Controllers for detecting attacks on switches.

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Inclusion

Connectivity Bridges: Reaching remote locations with high-speed Internet services. Rural Broadband — AirJaldi. India. USD 150,000.

Various Internet infrastructure initiatives have deployed technologies across parts of India using both wired and wireless Internet. However, rural areas aren’t easily connected leading to some infrastructure being under-used, particularly large communication towers.

This impact grant will help create a hybrid ‘WiFiber’ system that bridges existing infrastructure and adds capability and coverage to reach users in the mostly rural state of Arunachal Pradesh with fast and affordable Internet services.

Local community-based Internet infrastructure development and Internet utilization in rural Indonesia. Common Room. Indonesia. USD 150,000.

An existing partnership between Common Room, the Association for Progressive Communications, and the UK’s Digital Access Programme has resulted in the development of a School for Community Networking in the Kasepuhan Ciptagelar region of Indonesia.

This impact grant will help the school provide necessary infrastructure for a ‘build out’ to extend Internet deployment and training for indigenous and other rural communities in and around seven locations.

The project will provide towers, wireless equipment, servers, and training. It will also provide support as community-based Internet is rolled out, to help demonstrate ways the Internet can benefit these communities.

Equal access to information society in Myanmar. Myanmar Book Aid and Preservation Foundation. Myanmar. USD 150,000.

This project will help the Myanmar Book Aid and Preservation Foundation combine and scale three programs: Mobile Information Literacy, Tech Age Girls Myanmar, and the Business Startup Development Program.

The Beyond Access project has already equipped 210 libraries around Myanmar with Internet, enabling 360,000 people to use a digital device for the first time. Telco Ooredoo Myanmar will invest in an additional 40 community libraries, mostly in underserved or unserved areas.

This impact grant will focus on equipping thousands of participants — primarily youth and women — at these 40 additional community libraries to develop digital literacy skills.

Broadband for all in Yap. Boom! Inc. Federated States of Micronesia. USD 85,000.

This project will establish an island-wide Fixed Wireless Access broadband network on the island of Yap.

In 2017, Yap to the world via high-speed submarine fibre-optic cable. There is still a lot of work to be done before this improved capacity can be used to provide broadband connectivity to island residents. In a recent proof-of-concept, Boom! was able to provide high speed connectivity to a school in Yap, having obtained the necessary licence and wavelength agreements. This scale-up grant will extend coverage to other parts of Yap.

Bamboo towers for low-cost and sustainable rural Internet connectivity. National Institute of Technology Silchar. India. USD 85,000.

This project is a collaboration among the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay), National Institute of Technology Silchar (NIT Silchar), and Uravu from India. The project will develop and promote low-cost and sustainable bamboo communication towers to expand access to broadband networks in remote and rural areas of India. The scale-up grant will fund the development of detailed instructions on how to construct bamboo towers — including selection of bamboo, treatment, testing of bamboo culms and their joints, structural design considering connectivity requirements and structural specifications, optimization, foundation design, erection of the tower, and its maintenance. Towers will also be constructed to test the proposed methods, and they will be able to be built in any region. Detailed multimedia manuals will also be developed and available on a dedicated website.

OASIS data garden project. SATSOL. Solomon Islands. USD 85,000.

Some communities in the Solomon Islands are faced with the challenges of a lack of electricity for digital devices, and limited means to access money electronically. This means that residents have to travel to a town to access banknotes.

This scale-up grant will fund the development and proof-of-concept testing of a ‘data garden’ that will supply affordable connectivity, power, and a digital payment system.

An OASIS data garden can be easily transported to any remote location in the Solomon Islands via small boat or vehicle, and will operate autonomously. The data garden will support remote villages and communities where it can provide for individuals, households, businesses, schools, and clinics.

Internet connection to four villages in San Isidro. Davao Medical School Foundation (DMSF). The Philippines. USD 30,000.

This small grant project will connect four villages in the San Isidro municipality of Mindanao via Point to Point (P2P) data connections. A P2P connection is a closed network data transport service that traverses the public Internet but is inherently secure with no data encryption needed. A P2P network can also be configured to carry voice, video, Internet, and data services together over the same point to point connection. DMSF will partner with local organizations in each village to develop local capacity for maintenance and security.

Inclusive and efficient access to Internet services and information for persons with disabilities in Bangladesh. Humanity & Inclusion. Bangladesh. USD 30,000.

This project aims to assist people with visual disabilities in Bangladesh, by disseminating standards on accessible web design and screen-reading software.

Around 20% of the population of Bangladesh lives under the poverty line. As Internet adoption rapidly climbs, new opportunities in employment and education are presented via the Internet. However, people with visual disabilities face added challenges in Internet accessibility.

The project, funded with a small grant, will translate visual accessibility standards into the local language and train web developers in these standards. It will also engage in policy dialogue and advocacy for people with disabilities.

Empowering remote agricultural communities in Lao PDR through long-range wide area networks. Makerbox Lao. Lao PDR. USD 30,000.

This project will leverage the possibilities offered by low-power/long-range Internet of Things solutions to bridge the technological and communication divide between urban centres and remote agricultural communities in Lao PDR.

The small grant will help develop a prototype technology that uses long range (LoRa) wireless networking to relay agricultural data (such as soil, weather, and water information) from sensors in remote areas to forecasting experts, then relay that forecast information to farmers in a format that supports their work. The design also considers local conditions such as the absence of power grid connections by developing a solar power support, which LoRa is ideally suited to handle due to its low power consumption.

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Knowledge

Intelligent honeynet threat sharing platform. Swiss German University. Indonesia. USD 150,000.

This project will fully extend the design of the existing Honeynet Threat Sharing Platform [PDF] to provide a broader range of honeypot support, with intelligently categorized and correlated threat data, enabling organizations to share and exchange the threat information with other organizations with a consistent format.

This impact grant will support a partnership between Swiss German University, Badan Siber & Sandi Negara (Indonesia’s National Cyber and Crypto Agency), and the Indonesia Honeynet Project (IHP).

A range of economies are participating in the project, including Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, Timor Leste, and Viet Nam.

Two previous ISIF Asia grants supported the development of the Honeynet Threat Sharing Platform, to link honeypots together in a Honeynet that collects information on malicious Internet traffic for a public dashboard. To facilitate cooperation among participants, the Cyber Security Community Information Sharing and Analysis Center (CSC-ISAC) was also established.

The project involved four types of honeypot: Cowrie (SSH honeypots), Dionaea (Multi-Service Honeypots), Elastichoney, and Conpots (Industrial Control Honeypots).

Developing a collaborative BGP routing, analyzing and diagnosing platform. Tsinghua University. China. USD 150,000.

This project is a collaboration between National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) and research universities in the Asia Pacific, to build the kind of trust and BGP capabilities among NRENs that the wider BGP-speaking community relies upon. Currently, there is no large-scale cooperative monitoring system for BGP routing and no collaborative system for BGP hijacking and mitigation among Asia Pacific NRENs.

An earlier but ongoing project resulted in the development of a small-scale looking glass platform and BGP routing collection platform. This impact grant will expand the platform to a BGP hijacking detection and mitigation system and foster the emerging NREN network operations and security community. In addition, the team will analyze the robustness of routing in the Asia Pacific region and suggest how to improve the reliability of Internet routing through cooperative interconnections.

The organizations involved include CERNET (China), SingAREN (Singapore), ThaiREN (Thailand), BdREN (Bangladesh), LEARN (Sri Lanka), AfgREN (Afghanistan), MYREN (Malaysia), NREN Nepal (Nepal), APAN-JP (Japan), ERNET (India), DOST-ASTI/PREGINET (Philippines), HARNET/JUCC (Hong Kong), Gottingen University (Germany), Surrey University (UK), and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunication (China).

Bug Zero. SCoRe Lab. Sri Lanka. USD 85,000.

Bug bounties are when organizations offer rewards to those who are the first to report a problem in their software. This helps them stay ahead of emerging security vulnerabilities.

Bug bounty platforms have helped many organizations in advanced economies worldwide but South Asia has been hesitant to embrace them. Equipped with empirical research data on published results, SCoRe Lab has already started a bug bounty platform in Sri Lanka called Bug Zero.

This scale-up grant will help promote bug bounties as an effective tool for organizations, while also promoting them as a good economic opportunity for youth and encourage inclusion in an area that has generally been male-dominated.

Training and knowledge sharing: Network analysis for AI transformation. TeleMARS. Australia. USD 85,000.

Research from a previous ISIF Asia grant demonstrated that Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques can be used to resolve problems when detecting cyberattacks. This scale-up grant will help implement that work on a larger scale. This will involve strengthening knowledge sharing across Network Operator Groups (NOGs) and Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs), developing training and mentoring resources, and improving professional capabilities in the areas of diagnosis, monitoring, and analysis of historical datasets.

Webinar series to support IPv6 knowledge transfer. India Internet Engineering Society (IIESoc). India. USD 30,000.

This project will continue a series of webinars that have helped enterprises develop IPv6 skills, supported by ISIF Asia through a 2020 grant.

It can be difficult to encourage enterprises to adopt IPv6. One of the issues is a lack of understanding about the technical aspects of IPv6 among some enterprise technicians. Sometimes, technicians seek training but management does not always see the business case for adoption. This small grant will continue and expand a previous series of webinars supported by ISIF Asia that have helped enterprises develop IPv6 skills, in an effort to combat a cycle of misinformation that makes enterprises hesitant to adopt IPv6.

DIY COW — An inclusive community operated wireless kit for enabling local communications at remote locations. Servelots Infotech. India. USD 30,000.

Using lessons learned during remote mentoring for young women in COVID-19 lockdowns, this project will create a Do It Yourself kit that will allow someone with no Internet access to set up a wireless access point with a local access server.

Establishing network connections in remote communities is difficult and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) don’t always see a commercial case in establishing Internet services in small areas. This project funds the creation of kits that can be immediately deployed to connect these communities without relying on any existing Internet connection.

This small grant will help develop kits that allow for the rapid establishment of a server capable of hosting applications that can immediately be used by the community. The kit contains all the necessary instruction materials to be set up without an Internet connection. It can also be connected to the Internet when and if the Internet gateway becomes available, and the set-up materials can easily be adapted to other languages

Cybersecurity education. Passerelles Numeriques Cambodia. Cambodia. USD 30,000.

This project will create fun and accessible online learning content on security issues faced by the public and organizations while navigating the Internet. Cambodia is rapidly digitizing, due in part to the rapid adoption of smartphones. However, with increased Internet adoption comes an increase in cyber-threats. The Cambodian government is currently in discussions to establish a cyber-crime law.

In the meantime, there is a need for greater cybersecurity awareness. This project is a partnership between NGOs Passerelles Numeriques Cambodia and The Foundry. It will develop simple interactive videos and quizzes to test awareness and develop public knowledge about security threats they can encounter in their daily lives. This project, funded with a small grant, focuses on youth and women facing digital literacy challenges.

Design, development and operation of an SDN-based Internet eXchange playground for networkers. University of Malaya. Malaysia. USD 30,000.

Network operators have access to a variety of technical training programs, some include the use of simulations, which are useful to put theory into practice but can be limited to simple configurations for experiments.

This small grant will help build on existing training programs by developing an ‘Internet Exchange Playground’ with a Kubernetes cluster that can help introduce SDN-based BGP/RPKI/RDAP knowledge. The Kubernetes nodes will be scattered across different economies, allowing participants to experiment with cross-border network topologies. It will allow for use of VXLAN and SDN controllers in a WAN environment.

To enhance access, there will be four on-line training, tutorials and seminars aimed at fostering participation, particularly among women. The project will be fostering participation from Bhutan, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand.

The APNIC Foundation thanks all applicants for sharing their ideas, the members of the Selection Committees for their hard work, and the Trust for supporting these projects. Technical reports on the projects will be published on the ISIF Asia website as they are completed.

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Report available! RPKI Monitor and Visualizer for Detecting and Alerting for RPKI Errors

Dr. Di Ma from the Internet DNS Beijing Engineering Research Center (ZDNS) has completed the report for one of the grants that was allocated in 2018 for implementation in 2019, titled “RPKI Monitor and Visualizer for Detecting and Alerting for RPKI Errors”.

This project implements an RPKI security mechanism that detects and counters adverse actions in the RPKI, which helps mitigate risks to global routing system. The mechanism is implemented by two components: the monitor, which detects erroneous or malicious RPKI changes, and the visualizer, which displays graphically the validation process passed to it by the validator and the alert information issued by the monitor.

The project achieved the following objectives:

  • Develop an RPKI Monitor to detect RPKI problems due to mistakes by or attacks against CAs and repositories, and generate alerts to the affected parties to remedy the problems. It also provides suggestions to guide RPs in deciding whether to accept or defer accepting those changes.
  • Develop an RPKI Visualizer to display graphically the validation process and involved RPKI data passed to it by the validator and the alert information issued by the Monitor.

The report is publicly available.

Report available! Scalable Traffic Classification in Internet of Things (IoT) for Network Anomaly Detection

Prof. Winston Seah from the School of Engineering and Computer Science at the Victoria University of Wellington has completed the report for one of the grants that was allocated in 2017 for implementation in 2018, titled “Scalable Traffic Classification in Internet of Things (IoT) for Network Anomaly Detection”.

The project focused on accurate traffic classification in the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT comprises large numbers of heterogeneous simple devices running single applications, often with little to no security features making them easily compromised and used as tools in cyberattacks. As we become more connected and reliant on the Internet, any form of disruption in connectivity due network anomalies can result in adverse consequences, ranging from loss of productivity and revenue, to destruction of critical infrastructure and loss of life. In the last decade, cyberattacks have increased at an alarming rate, even just based on the reported incidents. We need to be able to classify new traffic types coming from IoT devices accurately and promptly, so that anomalous traffic can be identified and dealt with quickly.

Payload-based (PB) techniques although can reach high accuracy, but suffers from several limitations. The limitations of PB classification are expected to be addressed by statistical-based (SB) techniques. SB approaches are based on flow features and the traffic is classified using Machine Learning algorithms (MLAs). SB classification assumes that specific flow-level features such as flow duration, inter-arrival time, transmitted bytes, packet length and packet size can distinguish different types of traffic flows. We studied how unsupervised machine learning can be applied to network anomaly detection in the dynamic IoT environment where previously unencountered traffic types and patterns are regularly emerging and need to be identified and classified. This project involves the study and selection of appropriate MLAs (to be implemented as a proof-of-concept prototype) and identification of those flow features which have the highest impact on the traffic classification accuracy. This project contributes to making safer cyber-physical systems that are an integral component of the IoT.

The report is publicly available.

Congratulations to the ISIF Asia Grantees for 2019

This year ISIF Asia selected 6 organizations in the Asia Pacific to receive USD 20,000 to support research and development of Internet technologies for the benefit of the region. The ideas they submitted for the 2019 call for proposals highlight the main technical, operational and development issues that concern the Asia Pacific Internet community and concrete solutions to address them. This year’s funding round marks our 11th anniversary of operation in the Asia Pacific, and a total of USD 120,000 was allocated.

The application process this year, as the topics for our grants get more specialized, attracted highly relevant proposals and highlighted how a variety of stakeholders are working towards the development of the Internet. We see those as great indicators about the relevance of ISIF Asia as a mechanism to support the development of the Internet across the region. We received 70 proposals from 17 economies.

The funding will be distributed among organizations representing Private Sector (1) and Academia (5) across 5 economies: Australia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and New Zealand.

We are confident the outcomes of their work will continue to support an open, stable, and secure Internet that serves the needs of the people in our region.

2019 Network Operations Research Grants

  • Modelling and identifying IP address space fragmentation pressure points. Curtin University. Australia. USD 20,000
  • Honeynet Threat Sharing Platform. Swiss German University (SGU), Badan Siber & Sandi Negara (BSSN) and Indonesia Honeynet Project (IHP). Indonesia. USD 20,000
  • Implementation and Utilites of RDAP for wider usability among Internet Stakeholders. University of Malaya. Malaysia. USD 20,000
  • Network coding over satellite links: scheduling redundancy for better goodput. The University of Auckland. New Zealand. USD 20,000

2019 I4D Powering Internet Infrastructure Grants

  • Telemetering the telltale signs of power issues of wireless internet relays. Rural Broadband – AirJaldi. India. USD 20,000
  • Network Remote Powering through Quasi-Passive Optical Nodes. Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT University). Australia. USD 20,000

The 2019 I4D Award was not granted this year, instead one additional grant under the Network Operations Research was allocated.

The APNIC Foundation and ISIF Asia thanks all the applicants for sharing their ideas with us, the Selection Committees members for their hard work to arrive to this great outcome, and to APNIC for their generous funding contributions for 2019.

Simulating satellite Internet traffic to a small island Internet provider

A significant number of islands are too remote to make submarine cable Internet connections economical. We’re looking mostly at the Pacific, but islands like these exist elsewhere, too. There are also remote places on some continents, and of course there are cruise ships, which can’t connect to cables while they’re underway. In such cases, the only way to provision Internet commercially at this point are satellites.

Satellite Internet is expensive and sells by the Mbps per month (megabits per second of capacity per month). So places with few people – up to several ten thousand perhaps – usually find themselves with connections clearly this side of a Gbps (gigabit per second). The time it takes for the bits to make their way to the satellite and back adds latency, and so we have all the ingredients for trouble: a bottleneck prone to congestion and long round-trip times (RTT) which give TCP senders an outdated picture of the actual level of congestion that their packets are going to encounter.

I have discussed these effects at length in two previous articles published at the APNIC blog, so won’t repeat this here. Suffice to say: It’s a problem worth investigating in depth, and we’re doing so with help from grants by ISIF Asia in 2014 and 2016 and Internet NZ. This blog post describes how we’ve built our simulator, which challenges we’ve come up against, and where we’re at some way down our journey.

What are the questions we want to answer?

The list is quite long, but our initial goals are:

  • We’d like to know under which circumstances (link type – GEO or MEO, bandwidth, load, input queue size) various adverse effects such as TCP queue oscillation or standing queues occur.
  • We’d like to know what input queue size represents the best compromise in different circumstances.
  • We’d like to know how much improvement we can expect from devices peripheral to the link, such as performance-enhancing proxies and network coders.
  • We’d like to know how best to parameterise such devices in the scenarios in which one might deploy them.
  • We’d like to know how devices with optimised parameters behave when loads and/or flow size distributions change.

That’s just a start, of course, and before we can answer any of these, the biggest question to solve is: How do you actually build, configure, and operate such a simulator?

Why simulate, and why build a hybrid software/hardware simulator?

We get this question a lot. There are things we simply can’t try on real satellite networks without causing serious inconvenience or cost. Some of the solutions we are looking at require significant changes in network topology. Any island out there keen to go without Internet for a few days while we try something out? So we’d better make sure it can be done in a controlled environment first.

Our first idea was to try to simulate things in software. There is a generation of engineers and networking people who have been brought up on the likes of ns-2, ns-3, mininet etc., and they swear by it. We’re part of that generation, but the moment we tried to simulate a satellite link in ns-2 with more than a couple of dozen Mbps and more than a handful of simultaneous users generating a realistic flow size distribution, we knew that we were in trouble. The experiment was meant to simulate just a few minutes’ worth of traffic, for just one link configuration, and we were looking at days of simulation. No way. This wasn’t scalable.

Also, with a software simulator, you rely on software simulating a complex system with timing, concurrent processes, etc., in an entirely sequential way. How do you know that it gets the chaos of congestion right?

So we opted for farming out as much as we could to hardware. Here, we’re dealing with actual network components, real packets, and real network stacks.

There’s been some debate as to whether we shouldn’t be calling the thing an emulator rather than a simulator. Point taken. It’s really a bit of both. We take a leaf here from airline flight simulators, which also leverage a lot of hardware.

The tangible assets

Our island-based clients at present are 84 Raspberry Pis, complemented by 10 Intel NUCs. Three Supermicro servers simulate the satellite link and terminal equipment (such as PEPs or network coding encoders and decoders), and another 14 Supermicros of varying vintage act as the servers of the world that provide the data which the clients on the island want.

The whole thing is tied together by a number of switches, and all servers have external Internet access, so we can remotely access them to control experiments without having to load the actual experimental channel. The image in Figure 1 below shows the topology – the “island” is to the right, the satellite “link” in the middle, and the “world” servers on the right.

Figure 1: The topology of our simulator. 84 Raspberry Pis and 10 Intel NUCs represent the island clients on the (blue) island network. Three Super Micro servers emulate the satellite link and run the core infrastructure either side (light blue network). A further 14 Super Micros represent the servers of the world that send data to the island (red network). All servers are accessible via our external network (green), so command and control don't interfere with experiments.
Figure 1: The topology of our simulator. 84 Raspberry Pis and 10 Intel NUCs represent the island clients on the (blue) island network. Three Super Micro servers emulate the satellite link and run the core infrastructure either side (light blue network). A further 14 Super Micros represent the servers of the world that send data to the island (red network). All servers are accessible via our external network (green), so command and control don’t interfere with experiments.

 

Simulating traffic: The need for realistic traffic data

High latency is a core difference between satellite networks and, say, LANs or MANs. As I’ve explained in a previous blog, this divides TCP flows (the packets of a TCP connection going in one direction) into two distinct categories: Flows which are long enough to become subject to TCP congestion control, and those that are so short that their last data packet has left the sender by the time the first ACK for data arrives.

In networks where RTT is no more than a millisecond or two, most flows fall into the former category. In a satellite network, most flows don’t experience congestion control – but contribute very little data. Most of the data on satellite networks lives in flows whose congestion window changes in response to ACKs received.

So we were lucky to have a bit of netflow data courtesy of a cooperating Pacific ISP. From this, we’ve been able to extract a flow size distribution to assist us in traffic generation. To give you a bit of an idea as to how long the tail of the distribution is: We’re looking at a median flow size of under 500 bytes, a mean flow size of around 50 kB, and a maximum flow size of around 1 GB.

A quick reminder for those who don’t like statistics: The median is what you get if you sort all flows by size and take the flow size half-way down the list. The mean is what you get by adding all flow sizes and dividing by the number of flows. A distribution with a long tail has a mean that’s miles from the median. Put simply: Most flows are small but most of the bytes sit in large flows.

Simulating traffic: Supplying a controllable load level

Another assumption we make is this: By and large, consumer Internet users are reasonably predictable creatures, especially if they come as a crowd. As a rule of thumb, if we increase the number of users by a factor of X, then we can reasonably expect that the number of flows of a particular size will also roughly increase by X. So if the flows we sampled were created by, say, 500 users, we can approximate the behaviour of 1000 users simply by creating twice as many flows from the same distribution. This gives us a kind of “load control knob” for our simulator.

But how are we creating the traffic? This is where our own purpose-built software comes in. Because we have only 84 Pis and 10 NUCs, but want to be able to simulate thousands of parallel flows, each physical “island client” has to play the role of a number of real clients. Our client software does this by creating a configurable number of “channels”, say 10 or 30 on each physical client machine.

Each channel creates a client socket, randomly selects one of our “world” servers to connect to, opens a connection and receives a certain number of bytes, which the server determines by random pick from our flow size distribution. The server then disconnects, and the client channel creates a new socket, selects another server, etc. Selecting the number of physical machines and client channels to use thus gives us an incremental way of ramping up load on the “link” while still having realistic conditions.

Simulating traffic: Methodology challenges

There are a couple of tricky spots to navigate, though: Firstly, netflow reports a significant number of flows that consist of only a single packet, with or without payload data. These could be rare ACKs flowing back from a slow connection in the opposite direction, or be SYN packets probing, or…

However, our client channels create a minimum amount traffic per flow through their connection handshake. This amount exceeds the flow size of these tiny flows. So we approximate the existence of these flows by pro-rating them in the distribution, i.e., each client channel connection accounts for several of these small single packet flows.

Secondly, the long tail of the distribution means that as we sample from it, our initial few samples are very likely to have an average size that is closer to the median than to the mean. In order to obtain a comparable mean, we need to run our experiments for long enough so that our large flows have a realistic chance to occur. This is a problem in particular with experiments using low bandwidths, high latencies (GEO sats), and a low number of client channels.

For example, a ten minute experiment simulating a 16 Mbps GEO link with 20 client channels will typically generate a total of only about 14,000 flows. The main reason for this is the time it takes to establish a connection via a GEO RTT of over 500 ms. Our distribution contains well over 100,000 flows, with only a handful of really giant flows. So results at this end are naturally a bit noisy, depending on whether, and which, giant flows in the 100’s of MB get picked by our servers. This forces us to run rather lengthy experiments at this end of the scale.

Simulating the satellite link itself

For our purposes, simulating a satellite link mainly means simulating the bandwidth bottleneck and the latency associated with it. More complex scenarios may include packet losses from noise or fading on the link, or issues related to link layer protocol. We’re dedicating an entire server to the simulation (server K in the centre of the topology diagram), so we have enough computing capacity to handle every case of interest. The rest is software, and here the choice is chiefly between a network simulator (such as, e.g., sns-3) and something relatively simple like the Linux tc utility.

The latter lets us simulate bandwidth constraints, delay, sporadic packet loss and jitter: enough for the moment. That said, it’s a complex beast, which exists in multiple versions and – as we found out – is quite quirky and not overly extensively documented.

Following examples given by various online sources, we configured a tc netem qdisc to represent the delay, which we in turn chained to a token bucket filter. The online sources also suggested quality control: ping across the simulated link to ensure the delay is place, then run iperf in UDP mode to see that the token bucket filter is working correctly. Sure enough, the copy-and-paste example passed these two tests with flying colours. It’s just that we then got rather strange results once we ran TCP across the link. So we decided to ping while we were running iperf. Big surprise: Some of the ping RTTs were in the hundreds of seconds – far longer than any buffer involved could explain. Moreover, no matter which configuration parameter we tweaked, the effect wouldn’t go away. So, a bug it seems. We finally found a workaround involving ingress redirection to an intermediate function block device, which passes all tests and produces sensible results for TCP. Just goes to show how important quality control is!

Simulating world latency

We also use a similar technique to add a variety of fixed ingress and egress delays to the “world” servers. This models the fact that TCP connections in real life don’t end at the off-island sat gate, but at a server that’s potentially a continent or two down the road and therefore another few dozen or even hundreds of milliseconds away.

Link periphery and data collection

We already know that we’ll want to try PEPs, network coders etc., so we have another server each on both the “island” (server L) and the “world” (server J) side of the server (K) that takes care of the “satellite link” itself. Where applicable, these servers host the PEPs and / or network coding encoders / decoders. Otherwise, these servers simply act as routers. In all cases, these two servers also function as our observation points.

At each of the two observation points, we run tcpdump on eth0 to capture all packets entering and leaving the link at either end. These get logged into pcap capture files on L and J.

An alternative to data capture here would be to capture and log on the clients and / or “world” servers. However, capture files are large and we expect lots of them, and the SD cards on the Raspberry Pis really aren’t a suitable storage medium for this sort of thing. Besides that, we’d like to let the Pis and servers get on with the job of generating and sinking traffic rather than writing large log files. Plus, we’d have to orchestrate the retrieval of logs from 108 machines with separate clocks, meaning we’d have trouble detecting effects such as link underutilisation.

So servers L and J are really without a lot of serious competition as observation points. After each experiment, we use tshark to translate the pcap files into text files, which we then copy to our storage server (bottom).

For some experiments, we also use other tools such as iperf (so we can monitor the performance of a well-defined individual download) or ping (to get a handle on RTT and queue sojourn times). We run these between the NUCs and some of the more powerful “world” servers.

A basic experiment sequence

Each experiment basically follows the same sequence, which we execute via our core script:

  1. Configure the “sat link” with the right bandwidth, latency, queue capacity etc.
  2. Configure and start any network coded tunnel or PEP link we wish to user between servers L and J.
  3. Start the tcpdump capture at the island end (server L) of the link
  4. Start the tcpdump capture at the world end (server J) of the link with a little delay. This ensures that we capture every packets heading from the world to the island side
  5. Start the iperf server on one of the NUCs. Note that in iperf, the client sends data to the server rather than downloading it.
  6. Start the world servers.
  7. Ping the special purpose client from the special purpose server. This functions as a kind of “referee’s start whistle” for the experiment as it creates a unique packet record in both tcpdump captures, allowing us to synchronise them later.
  8. Start the island clients as simultaneously as possible.
  9. Start the iperf client.
  10. Start pinging – typically, we ping 10 times per second.
  11. Wait for the core experiment duration to expire. The clients terminate themselves.
  12. Ping the special purpose client from the special purpose server again (“stop whistle”).
  13. Terminate pinging (usually, we ping only for part of the experiment period, though)
  14. Terminate the iperf client.
  15. Terminate the iperf server.
  16. Terminate the world servers.
  17. Convert the pcap files on J and L into text log files with tshark
  18. Retrieve text log files, iperf log and ping log to the storage server.
  19. Start the analysis on the storage server.

Between most steps, there is a wait period to allow the previous step to complete. For a low load 8 Mbps GEO link, the core experiment time needs to be 10 minutes to yield a half-way representative sample from the flow size distribution. The upshot is that the pcap log files are small, so need less time for conversion and transfer to storage. For higher bandwidths and more client channels, we can get away with shorter core experiment durations. However, as they produce larger pcap files, conversion and transfer take longer. Altogether, we budget around 20 minutes for a basic experiment run.

Tying it all together

We now have more than 100 machines in the simulator. Even in our basic experiments sequence, we tend to use most if not all of them. This means we need to be able to issue commands to individual machines or groups of machines in an efficient manner, and we need to be able to script this.

Enter the pssh utility. This useful little program lets our scripts establish a number of SSH connections to multiple machines simultaneously, e.g., to start our servers or clients, or to distribute configuration information. It’s not without its pitfalls though: For one, the present version has a hardwired limit of 32 simultaneous connections that isn’t properly document in the man page. If one requests more than 32 connections, pssh quietly runs the first 32 immediately and then delays the next 32 by 60 seconds, the next 32 by 120 seconds, etc.

We wouldn’t have noticed this hadn’t we added a feature to our analysis script that checks whether all clients and servers involved in the experiment are being seen throughout the whole core experiment period. Originally, we’d intended this feature to pick up machines that had crashed or had failed to start. Instead, it alerted us to the fact that quite a few of our machines were late starters, always by exactly a minute or two.

We now have a script that we pass the number of client channels required. It computes how to distribute the load across the Pi and NUC clients, creates subsets of up to 32 machines to pass to pssh, and invokes the right number of pssh instances with the right client parameters. This lets us start up all client machines within typically less than a second. The whole episode condemned a week’s worth of data to /dev/null, but shows again just how important quality assurance is.

Automating the complex processes is vital, so we keep adding scripts to the simulator as we go to assist us in various aspects of analysis and quality assurance.

Observations – and how we use them

Our basic experiment collects four pieces of information:

  1. A log file with information on the packets that enter the link from the “world” side at J (or the PEP or network encoder as the case may be). This file includes a time stamp for each packet, the source and destination addresses and ports, and the sizes of IP packets, the TCP packets they carry, and the size of the payload they contain, plus sequence and ACK numbers as well as the status of the TCP flags in the packet.
  2. A similar log file with information on the packets that emerge at the other end of the link from L and head to the “island” clients.
  3. An iperf log, showing average data rates achieved for the iperf transfer.
  4. A ping log, showing the sequence numbers and RTT values for the ping packets sent.

The first two files allow us to determine the total number of packets, bytes and TCP payload bytes that arrived at and left the link. This gives us throughput, goodput, and TCP byte loss, as well as a wealth of performance information for the clients and servers. For example, we can compute the number of flows achieved and the average number of parallel flows, or the throughput, goodput for and byte loss for each client.

Figure 2: Throughput and goodput on a simulated 16 Mbps satellite link carrying TCP for 20 client sockets with an input queue of 100kB on the satellite uplink. Note clear evidence of link underutilisation - yet the link is already impaired.
Figure 2: Throughput and goodput on a simulated 16 Mbps satellite link carrying TCP for 20 client sockets with an input queue of 100kB on the satellite uplink. Note clear evidence of link underutilisation – yet the link is already impaired.

Figure 2 above shows throughput (blue) and goodput (red) in relation to link capacity, taken at 100 ms intervals. The link capacity is the brown horizontal line – 16 Mbps in this case.

Any bit of blue that doesn’t reach the brown line represents idle link capacity – evidence of an empty queue some time during the 100 ms in question. So you’d think there’s be no problem fitting a little bit of download in, right? Well that’s exactly what we’re doing at the beginning of the experiment, and you can indeed see that there’s quite a bit less spare capacity – but still room for improvement.

Don’t believe me? Well, the iperf log gives us an idea as to how a single long download fares in terms of throughput. Remember that our clients and servers aim at creating a flow mix but don’t aim to complete a standardised long download. So iperf is the more appropriate tool here. In this example, our 40 MB download takes over 120 s with an average rate of 2.6 Mbps. If we run the same experiment with 10 client channels instead of 20, iperf might take only a third of the time (41 s) to complete the download. That is basically the time it takes if the download has the link to itself. So adding the extra 10 client channel load clearly has a significant impact.

At 50 client channels, iperf takes 186 seconds, although this figure can vary considerably depending which other randomly selected flows run in parallel. At 100 client channels, the download sometimes won’t even complete – if it does, it’s usually above the 400 second mark & there’s very little spare capacity left (Figure 3).

 

Figure 3: At 100 client channels, the download does not complete but there is still a little spare capacity left.
Figure 3: At 100 client channels, the download does not complete but there is still a little spare capacity left.

 

You might ask why the iperf download is so visible in Figure 1 compared to the traffic contributed by our hundreds of client channels? The answer lies once again in the extreme nature of our flow size distribution and the fact that at any time, a lot of the channels are in connection establishment mode: The 20 client channel experiment above averages only just under 18 parallel flows, and almost all of the 14,000 flows this experiment generates are less than 40 MB: In fact, 99.989% of the flows in our distribution are shorter than our 40 MB download. As we add more load, the iperf download gets more “competition” and also contributes at a lower goodput rate.

The ping log, finally, gives us a pretty good estimate of queue sojourn time. We know the residual RTT from our configuration but can also measure it by pinging after step 2 in the basic experiment sequence. Any additional RTT during the experiment reflects the extra time that the ICMP ping packets spend being queued behind larger data packets waiting for transmission.

One nice feature here is that our queue at server K practically never fills completely: To do so, the last byte of the last packet to be accepted into the queue would have to occupy the last byte of queue capacity. However, with data packets being around 1500 bytes, the more common scenario is that the queue starts rejecting data packets once it has less than 1500 bytes capacity left. There’s generally still enough capacity for the short ping packets to slip in like a mouse into a crowded bus, though. It’s one of the reasons why standard size pings aren’t a good way of detecting whether your link is suffering from packet loss, but for our purposes – measuring sojourn time – it comes in really handy.

Figure 4 shows the ping RTTs for the first 120 seconds of the 100 client channel experiment above. Notice how the maximum RTT tops out at just below 610 ms? That’s 50 ms above the residual RTT of 560 ms (500 satellite RTT and 60 ms terrestrial), +/-5% terrestrial jitter that we’ve configured here. No surprises here: That’s exactly the time it takes to transmit the 800 kbits of capacity that the queue provides. In other words: The pings at the top of the peaks in the plot hit a queue that was, for the purposes of data transfer, overflowing.

The RTT here manages to hit its minimum quite frequently, and this shows in throughput of just under 14 Mbps, 2 Mbps below link capacity.

Figure 4: Ping RTTs during the first 120 seconds.
Figure 4: Ping RTTs during the first 120 seconds.

Note also that where the queue hits capacity, it generally drains again within a very short time frame. This is queue oscillation. Note also that we ping only once every 100 ms, so we may be missing shorter queue drain or overflow events here because they are too short in duration – and going by the throughput, we know that we have plenty of drain events.

This plot also illustrates one of the drawbacks of having a queue: between e.g., 35 and 65 seconds, there are multiple occasions when the RTT doesn’t return to residual for a couple of seconds. This is called a “standing queue” – the phenomenon commonly associated with buffer bloat. At times, the standing queue doesn’t contribute to actual buffering for a couple of seconds but simply adds 20 ms or so of delay. This is undesirable, not just for real-time traffic using the same queue, but also for TCP trying to get a handle on the RTT. Here, it’s not dramatic, but if we add queue capacity, we can provoke an almost continuous standing queue: the more buffer we provide, the longer it will get under load.

Should we be losing packet loss altogether?

There’s one famous observable that’s often talked about but surprisingly difficult to measure here: packet loss. How come, you may ask, given that we have lists of packets from before and after the satellite link?

Essentially, the problem boils down to the question of what we count as a packet, segment or datagram at different stages of the path.

Here’s the gory detail: The maximum size of a TCP packet can in theory be anything that will fit inside a single IP packet. The size of the IP packet in turn has to fit into the Ethernet (or other physical layer) frame and has to be able to be processed along the path.

In our simulator, and in most real connected networks, we have two incompatible goals: Large frames and packets are desirable because they lower overhead. On the other hand, if noise or interference hits on the satellite link, large frames present a higher risk of data loss: Firstly, at a given bit error rate, large packets are more likely to cop bit errors than small ones. Secondly, we lose more data if we have to discard a large packet after a bit error than if we have to discard a small packet only.

Then again, most of our servers sit on Gbps Ethernet or similar, where the network interfaces have the option of using jumbo frames. The jumbo frame size of up to 9000 bytes represents a compromise deemed reasonable for this medium. However, these may not be ideal for a satellite link. For example, given a bit error probability of 0.0000001, we can expect to lose 7 in 1000 jumbo frames, or 0.7% of our packet data. If we use 1500 byte frames instead, we’ll only lose just over 1 in 1000 frames, or 0.12% of our packet data. Why is that important? Because packet loss really puts the brakes on TCP, and these numbers really make a difference.

The number of bytes that a link may transfer in a single IP packet is generally known as the maximum transmission unit (MTU). There are several ways to deal with diversity in MTUs along the path: Either, we can restrict the size of our TCP segment right from the sender to fit into the smallest MTU along the path, or we can rely on devices along the way to split IP packets with TCP segments into smaller IP packets for us. Modern network interfaces do this on the fly with TCP segmentation offload (TSO) and generic segmentation offload (GSO, see https://sandilands.info/sgordon/segmentation-offloading-with-wireshark-and-ethtool). Finally, the emergency option when an oversize IP datagram hits a link is to fragment the IP datagram.

In practice, TSO and GSO are so widespread that TCP senders on a Gbps network will generally transmit jumbo frames and have devices further down the path worry about it. This leaves us with a choice in principle: Allow jumbo frames across the “satellite link”, or break them up?

Enter the token bucket filter: If we want to use jumbo frames, we need to make the token bucket large enough to accept them. This has an undesirable side effect: Whenever the bucket has had a chance to fill with tokens, any arriving packets that are ready to consume them get forwarded immediately, regardless of rate (which is why you see small amounts of excess throughput in the plots above). So we’d “buy” jumbo frame capability by considerably relaxing instantaneous rate control for smaller data packets. That’s not what we want, so it seems prudent to stick with the “usual” MTUs of around 1500 bytes and accept fragmentation of large packets.

There’s also the issue of tcpdump not necessarily seeing the true number of packets/fragments involved, because it captures before segmentation offload etc. (https://ask.wireshark.org/questions/3949/tcpdump-vs-wireshark-differences-packets-merged).

The gist of it all: The packets we see going into the link aren’t necessarily the packets that we see coming out at the other end. Unfortunately that happens in a frighteningly large number of cases.

In principle, we could check from TCP sequence numbers & IP fragments whether all parts of each packet going in are represented in the packets going out. However, with 94 clients all connecting to 14 servers with up to 40-or-so parallel channels, doing the sequence number accounting is quite a computing-intensive task. But is it worth it? For example, if I count a small data packet with 200 bytes as lost when it doesn’t come out the far end, then what happens when I have a jumbo frame packet with 8000 bytes that gets fragmented into 7 smaller packets and one of these fragments gets dropped? Do I count the latter as one packet loss, or 1/7th of a packet loss, or what?

The good news: For our purposes, packet loss doesn’t actually help explain much unless we take it as an estimate of byte loss. But byte loss is an observable we can compute very easily here: We simply compare the number of observed TCP payload bytes on either side of the link. Any missing byte must clearly have been in a packet that got lost.

Quality control

There is a saying in my native Germany: “Wer misst, misst Mist”. Roughly translated, it’s a warning that those who measure blindly tend to produce rubbish results. We’ve already seen a couple of examples of how an “out-of-left field” effect caused us problems. I’ll spare you some of the others but will say that there were just a few!

So what are we doing to ensure we’re producing solid data? Essentially, we rely on four pillars:

  1. Configuration verification and testing. This includes checking that link setups have the bandwidth configured, that servers and clients are capable of handling the load, and that all machines are up and running at the beginning of an experiment.
  2. Automated log file analysis. When we compare the log files from either side of the link, we also compute statistics about when each client and server was first and last seen, and how much traffic went to/from the respective machine. Whenever a machine deviates from the average by more than a small tolerance or a machine doesn’t show up at all, we issue a warning.
  3. Human inspection of results: Are the results feasible? E.g., are throughput and goodput within capacity limits? Do observables change in the expected direction when we change parameters such as load or queue capacity? Plots such as those discussed above also assist us in assessing quality. Do they show what we’d expect, or do they show artefacts? This also includes discussion of our results so there are at least four eyes looking at data.
  4. Scripting: Configuring an experiment requires the setting of no less than seven parameters for the link simulation, fourteen different RTT latencies for the servers, and load and timeout configurations for 94 client machines, an iperf download size, plus the orchestrated execution of everything with the right timing – see above. Configuring all of this manually would be a recipe for disaster, so we script as much as we can – this takes care of a lot of typos!

Also, an underperforming satellite link could simply be a matter of bad link configuration rather than a fundamental problem with TCP congestion control. It would be all too easy to take a particular combination of link capacity and queue capacity to demonstrate an effect without asking what influence these parameters have on the effect. This is why we’re performing sweeps – when it comes to comparing the performance of different technologies, we want to ensure that we are putting our best foot forward.

Sweeping

So what’s the best queue capacity for a given link capacity? You may remember the old formula for sizing router queue, RTT * bandwidth. However, there’s also Guido Appenzeller’s PhD thesis from Stanford, in which he recommends to divide this figure by the square root of the number of long-lived parallel flows.

This presents us with a problem: We can have hundreds of parallel flows in the scenarios we’re looking at. However, how many of those will qualify as long-lived depends to no small extent on the queue capacity at the token bucket filter!

For example, take the 16 Mbps link with 20 client channels we’ve already looked at before. At 16 Mbps (=2MBps) and 500 ms RTT, the old formula suggests 1 MB queue capacity. We see fairly consistently 17-18 parallel flows (not necessarily long-lived ones, though) regardless of queue capacity. Assuming extremely naively that all of these flows might qualify as long-lived (well, we know they’re not), Guido’s results suggest dividing the 1MB by about a factor of around 4, which just so happens to be a little larger than the 100kB queue we’ve deployed here. But how do we know whether this is the best queue capacity to choose?

A real Internet satellite link generally doesn’t just see a constant load. So how do we know which queue capacity works best under a range of loads?

The only way to get a proper answer is to try feasible combinations of load levels and queue capacities. Which poses the next question: What exactly do we mean by “works best”?

Looking at the iperf download, increasing the queue size at 20 client channels always improves the download time. This would suggest dumping Guido’s insights in favour of the traditional value. Not so fast: Remember those standing queues in Figure 3? At around 20 ms extra delay, they seemed tolerable. Just going to a 200kB queue bumps these up to 80 ms, though, and they’re a lot more common, too. Anyone keen to annoy VoIP users for the sake of a download that could be three times faster? Maybe, maybe not. We’re clearly getting into compromise territory here, but around 100kB-200kB seems to be in the right ballpark.

So how do we get to zero in on a feasible range? Well, in the case of the 16 Mbps link, we looked at (“sweeped”) eleven potential queue capacities between 30 kB and 800 kB. For each capacity, we swept up to nine load levels between 10 and 600 client channels. That’s many dozens of combinations, each of which takes around 20 minutes to simulate, plus whatever time we then take for subsequent manual inspection. Multiply this with the number of possible link bandwidths of interest in GEO and MEO configuration, plus repeats for experiments with quality control issues, and we’ve got our worked carved out. It’s only then that we can get to coding and PEPs.

What’s next?

A lot. If the question on your mind starts with “Have you thought of…” or “Have you considered…,” the answer is possibly yes. Here are a few challenges ahead:

  • Network coding (TCP/NC): We’ve already got the encoder and decoder ready, and once the sweeps are complete and we have identified the parameter combinations that represent the best compromises, we’ll collect performance data here. Again, this will probably take a few sweeps of possible generation sizes and overhead settings.
  • Performance-enhancing proxies (PEP): We’ve identified two “free” PEPs, PEPSal and TCPEP, which we want to use both in comparison and – eventually – in combination with network coding.
  • UDP and similar protocols without congestion control. In our netflow samples, UDP traffic accounts for around 12% of bytes. How will TCP behave in the presence of UDP in our various scenarios? How do we best simulate UDP traffic given that we know observed throughput, but can only control offered load? In principle, we could model UDP as a bandwidth constraint, but under heavy TCP load, we get to drop UDP packets as well, so it’s a constraint that’s a little flexible, too. What impact does this have on parameters such as queue capacities, generation sizes etc.?
  • Most real links are asymmetric, i.e., the inbound bandwidth is a lot larger than the outbound bandwidth. So far, we have neglected this as our data suggests that the outbound channels tend to have comparatively generous share of the total bandwidth.
  • Simulating world latencies. At this point, we’re using a crude set of delays on our 14 “world servers”. We haven’t even added jitter. What if we did? What if we replaced our current crude model of “satgate in Hawaii” with a “satgate in X” model, where the latencies from the satgate in X to the servers would be distributed differently?

 

As you can see, lots of interesting work ahead!